I was trying to use twitter.pl from pidgin-twitterstatus according to a blog post by Daily Gian but had some problems. Here’s how I solved them. I’ve sent this stuff to the plugin maintainer; I’m not sure what he’ll do with this.

Anyway… Gian says the following:

Install Pidgin. Done. 👌

Install Perl. Done. Twice. ;)

Install XML::XPath. Done. But as it turns out, not ok. ⚠

Launch Pidgin and check Help → About, scroll to the bottom of the page. You should see a line saying Perl: Enabled.

Download twitter.pl and put it into your Pidgin plugins folder.

Restart Pidgin and go to Tools → Plugins. There will be a new plugin named “Twitter Status Feed”. Enable it and click on Configure Plugin. Enter your twitter user name in the dialog box that pops up.

Done. Soon you will find that your Pidgin status bar reads the same as your last Twitted message.

When I check my Pidgin About box, I see that Perl is enabled. I have a Cygwin Perl and an ActivePerl installed. When I run perl from the command line, I get Cygwin Perl. I don’t see the Twitter plugin in my list at Tools → Plugins.

When I switch to C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins and try to run Perl on twitter.el (just to check that everything works fine) I get the following problem:

C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins>perl -I ../perlmod twitter.pl
Can't load '../perlmod/Purple.dll' for module Purple: No such file or directory
at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8/cygwin/DynaLoader.pm line 230.
at twitter.pl line 1
Compilation failed in require at twitter.pl line 1.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at twitter.pl line 1.

(

Try again:

C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins>set Path=C:/Perl/bin;%Path%
C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins>perl -I ../perlmod twitter.pl
Can't load '../perlmod/Purple.dll' for module Purple: load_file:The specified mo
dule could not be found at C:/Perl/lib/DynaLoader.pm line 230.
at twitter.pl line 1
Compilation failed in require at twitter.pl line 1.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at twitter.pl line 1.

Plus I get a message box about failing to start because libglib-2.0-0.dll was not found.

I configured it by setting my Twitter name, added myself as my own buddy just to double check, waited for a minute, but apparently my latest Twitter status is not showing up. I check http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-twitterstatus/downloads/list again and find that there is a 0.2.1 version listed that doesn’t match what I downloaded. Weird. :question:

I close Pidgin, copy the new one into my plugins directory, delete the existing twitter.pl, restart Pidgin, reenable the plugin, check the configuration (my name is still there), and it works! My Pidgin status message is changed to my latest Twitter status message. 👌 💡

Comments

Well, I don’t use separate clients for GTalk and AIM. I use Pidgin on Windows (at work) and Adium on a Mac (at home) for all my instant messaging needs. Both are multi-protocol clients based on libpurple (formerly libgaim).